The Future is Now! Five Steps to a Cooler, Space-Age House.

By Lev Novak

While many of us have smart phones and computers, a smart house is at least twenty years away. Well, I say that’s too long to wait.

Instead of waiting for a Jetson’s house to magically appear on the market, here are tips to engineer your apartment to near robot-like levels of cool.

1. Have Wall-Mounted Bottle Openers, then Tape Solo Cups Under Them.

This is something I saw in action, and is beautiful to behold.

A wall-mounted bottle opener is an awesome idea already: bottle-openers are a key thing to have in a house, and the little keychain ones can be a pain to deal with. But a wall-mounted bottle-opener is impossible to lose, impossible to mis-use, and won’t scratch the side of your table when you try to do that one thing that, to be honest, never really works right, so can we, as a beer-drinking nation, stop doing it?

I got a little off track. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Under your wall-mounted bottle opener, you do something very simple. You tape a red Solo cup. This ensures that you only need one hand to pop the bottle- the second hand that would be holding the bottle is replaced by the wall and you no longer have to worry about a bottle-cap falling all over your floor. So now you have a super easy bottle-opener you can never lose, a permanently cleaner kitchen (no bottle-caps under the fridge, or that you step on in the middle of the night) and, also, it’s really cool. When the cap falls into the Solo cup, you feel like a genius, and watching them pile up is always cool, too.

2. Tie a String to Your Remote

We’ve been raised to think that everything should be small and wireless as the ideal form of technology. That’s fine, until you lose your remote. Adding a string to the remote will give you a movable remote, but one you can always trace by the string. Every time I’ve seen it, it’s seemed cool.

3. Put a Sign on the Dishwasher

For “Clean” and “Dirty.” That’s it- nothing is more annoying than mis-counting the number of clean plates you have, or noticing that your “clean” plate has stains on it underneath the eggs you just put on it. A sign on the dishwasher is super easy, and it’ll keep your whole house cleaner. How? Because no one will have an excuse not to run the dishwasher now. You’re welcome, guys.

4. Reading Material For Your Bathroom

Get a bunch of old comic books from somewhere- they aren’t exactly hard to find, and good or bad, they’re always worth a glance there. Change them monthly. Bathroom reading material is always super appreciated and everyone in college always forgets it. Don’t forget it. Be a hero.

5. Keep Planning, Keep Trying

The most important thing in designing a smarter house is to continue to explore. Who says that the silverware drawer is the best place for silverware. Who says that all beds should be in a separate bedroom? Maybe you should all have one room that’s just a giant mattress fort with pillows and blankets and you just all live there.

Now, maybe that’s a terrible idea- but doesn’t it kind of sound awesomely terrible?

Think and try to put together awesome ideas.

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